3 Ways to Make a Margarita
A trio of delicious, satisfying variations on the summer classic.
You might be wondering whether anyone really needs to be taught how to make a Margarita.
The internet will provide you with any number of recipes, most of which revolve around some basic combination of tequila, lime, and an orange liqueur such as Cointreau, typically with a rim of salt and a wedge of lime for garnish.
If you don’t want to Google your way through recipe sites, there’s even an Archer meme that purports to explain the drink’s fundamental properties. The Margarita is a cocktail that has been so widely and thoroughly embraced that it is barely thought of as a cocktail anymore: It’s just a drink, and everyone seemingly already knows how to make it.
Part of the drink’s appeal is that, provided you stay within some basic parameters, it’s hard to make a truly terrible version; the Margarita’s popularity is matched by its flexibility. It can be served up or on the rocks, with tequila or mezcal, with a salt rim or without, with orange liqueur or with syrup. A single Margarita goes well with a meal or an afternoon by the pool. A pitcher of Margaritas is welcome at almost any outdoor party.
Even a bad Margarita is not so bad: Decades ago, before I knew anything about cocktails, I drank sugary, sloppily made Margaritas built from cheap ingredients at Florida beach bars. I wouldn’t care for a drink like that now, but I can’t say I don’t understand the appeal. As much as I believe the classic Daiquiri to be the ultimate summer cocktail, I am well aware that the Margarita is what everyone actually drinks when it’s hot out.
And yet, despite the Margarita’s adaptability, there are obviously superior versions that rely on quality ingredients, more precise proportions, and various other tweaks — including and especially the addition of agave syrup, which gives the drink a viscous texture and a subdued sweetness that pairs exceptionally well with both tequila and mezcal versions of the drink.
So for this week’s newsletter, I’m not going to give you a single perfected version of the drink, because I don’t think there is a single definitional Margarita.
Instead, I’m going to briefly walk you through this cocktail’s much-debated history, look at how that history informed the drink’s construction, and then go over three different ways to make a Margarita, each of which highlights some essential aspect of the drink, and each of which is incredibly satisfying on its own terms.
I Don’t Know the Reason, Stayed Here All Season
No one knows who invented the Margarita. There are multiple competing claims, each with some documentary evidence.
As David Wondrich writes in The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails, “the precise origins of the Margarita are one of cocktail history’s most notorious swamps and remain resistant to even the most diligent investigation.” If Wondrich, in his capacity as a full-time cocktail historian, can’t definitively pin down the drink’s backstory, there’s little hope for the rest of us.
Still, Wondrich offers a helpful timeline of the drink’s probable evolution. It is likely that the drink began in the 1930s as a variation on the Sidecar. The Sidecar, of course, is traditionally a mix of cognac, lemon juice, and orange liqueur, often with a sugar rim. The earliest Margarita-like drinks took that basic structure and swapped in tequila and lime juice, leaving out the sugar rim.
I say “Margarita-like,” because the cocktail was probably not called a Margarita at that point. But by the 1950s, the drink, which had come to include a salt rim, would be written up as a Margarita, most notably in a 1953 Esquire article that described the drink thusly: “She's from Mexico, Señores, and her name is the Margarita Cocktail — and she is lovely to look at, exciting and provocative.”
Why the Margarita? Again, no one knows for sure. But in Spanish, Margarita means “Daisy.” And the Daisy, as we have discussed previously, is a style of pre-Prohibition cocktail with links to the Sidecar. And there was at one point a cocktail in circulation referred to as a “Tequila Daisy.”
Early versions of what would become the Margarita were served up, with no ice — again, like a Sidecar. But eventually ice became more common. Later, frozen and blended versions appeared.
The drink began as a small, pure thing; like most classic cocktails, it was just a few ounces. But as the decades passed, many versions grew larger, filling giant mugs and ridiculous cocktail glassware. Sour mix was introduced into the equation, giving way to the oversized, poorly made versions I drank at Florida beach bars. Eventually, the Margarita became a sort of sludgy, barely distinct non-thing: cheap tequila, sweetened and soured, with some salt on the rim. It was a drink, not a cocktail.
On the one hand, all of this history is clear as mud.
On the other hand, the important takeaway is that the classic Margarita is part of the expanded Daisy family of cocktails, and that it’s very specifically a close sibling of the Sidecar. And since we’ve already spent some time deconstructing the Sidecar, we can apply some of the same lessons to its tequila-based variation.
The Lost Verse
Like the Sidecar, a classic Margarita is just a sour flavored with an orange liqueur. Regular readers will know by now that in virtually all such drinks, I prefer a small amount of additional sweetener to be involved: In a Sidecar, for example, I ditch the sugar rim but include a bit of extra sugar syrup. The Breakfast Martini is thickened and additionally sweetened by marmalade.
Cocktails sweetened entirely by Cointreau (or other similar orange liqueurs) tend to read too light in body, and not quite sweet enough. They need to be filled out and thickened up.
The question, then, is: What’s the best way to do that in a Margarita? The lazy Florida beach Margaritas I used to drink were typically sweetened with sour mix, but sour mix is an absolute non-starter in this newsletter. You can always use honey or some form of sugar syrup, but there’s a much better way: Agave syrup.
Agave syrup was introduced to the Margarita in the early 1990s by bartender Julio Bermejo at Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco. His version of the drink ignored the Margarita’s connections to the Daisy and the Sidecar and instead treated it like a basic, three-ingredient tequila sour, with one key difference: He used agave syrup in place of sugar syrup.
After all, he reasoned, tequila (and mezcal) are spirits derived from agave plants. Why not use a sweetener derived from the same source material to sweeten up the drink? My sense is that agave syrup was something of a specialty product at the time, but today it’s easy to find in grocery stores and on Amazon.
Bermejo’s version also emphasized the use of freshly squeezed lime juice and high-quality tequila made from 100 percent blue agave, in contrast to the cheaper, less flavorful “mixto” tequilas that were doctored with other ingredients, mostly sugars.
The resulting drink was dubbed the Tommy’s Margarita. It was a version of the classic that emphasized freshness, simplicity, and quality ingredients. And it was incredibly influential, demonstrating the huge gap between the lazy, sweet, oversized, sour-mix-laden versions of the drink that so many had consumed at beach bars and a more precise, more thoughtful version of the drink.
In this newsletter, I have often written about how modern bartenders have rescued bad cocktails, showing how care, quality, and precision could transform lousy, lazy cocktails into truly excellent drinks. The Margarita was among the first to undergo such a transformation, and perhaps the most important. Anyone who has consumed or made a truly outstanding Margarita in their life owes a debt to Julio Bermejo and the Tommy’s Margarita.
Searchin’ For My Lost Shaker of Salt
Before delving into recipes, I do want to address one final component of the drink: the salt rim.
People love the salt rim. It instantly identifies the drink as a Margarita. It adds a zesty pop to the first few sips of the cocktail. It looks pleasing.
I get it. The appeal of those big salt pieces on a cocktail is much the same as the appeal of big salt pieces on a soft pretzel. It’s a random zap of zesty flavor.
And I…am not a fan.
Yes, I like salt in cocktails. No, scratch that, I love salt in cocktails. I have argued repeatedly and possibly to the point of tedium that more people should use salt in cocktails at home.
But I don’t particularly like salt rims on Margarita glasses. Salt rims on Margaritas frustrate me for much the same reason that sugar rims on Sidecar rims frustrate me: The salt — or the sugar — should be mixed in with the drink!
Salt mixed evenly into the drink ensures that every sip has just the right amount of salty pop. Salt on the rim means that early sips are wildly oversalted up front, and later sips have little or no salt at all.
I like salt in cocktails, not loitering around near cocktails.
So once again I will ask you to shake some salt into the cocktail, integrating salt evenly into the entire drink.
Ideally, you’ll incorporate the salt by making 20 percent saline solution, a basic salt water. It’s just one part salt and four parts water, gently heated and stirred until fully integrated. Once it’s made, bottle it up and use an eye-dropper bottle to dispense it.
This adds consistency, since you can precisely measure the amount of saline going into the cocktail. (It also looks really cool when you’re making Margaritas for your friends and you produce a small unmarked dropper bottle and use it to drop tiny amounts of Mystery Liquid into the drink. Never underestimate the appeal of looking like a mad scientist while making cocktails.)
However, if you don’t want to take the time to make saline solution, you can always just add a tiny pinch of salt to your shaker as you make the drink instead. A pinch of salt will inevitably be slightly less consistent than a dropper, but it’s a perfectly good substitute. The point is to use salt inside the cocktail rather than on the outside of the glass.
(However, below I will offer a modification the fanatics who just don’t feel like it’s a margarita unless they’re inhaling some pure Diamond crystal along with their drink.)
Guidelines for Margaritas
We can now break this down into some broadly applicable guidelines:
A Margarita should always use tequila made from 100 percent blue agave. In the majority of cases, you’ll want to use blanco, or unaged, tequila. There are many such brands available, including quite a few that are relatively inexpensive. I almost always use Espolon, which runs less than $25 a bottle. I also like Altos and Jimador. Mezcal is somewhat more expensive, but Del Maguey Vida is very good and usually runs about $40 a bottle. I’m also fond of El Silencio Mezcal, which is typically priced closer to $30, and sometimes can be found for even less.
A Margarita should always use fresh lime juice. Many cocktail guides stress the necessity of using juice pressed the same day as the drink. Obviously that’s preferable, but as I have written before, if you fine strain your juice and store it in the refrigerator, it can last up to a few days, with some diminishing flavor impact. Whatever you do, you should endeavor to juice the limes yourself.
A Margarita may or may not involve an orange liqueur, but if it does, Cointreau is strongly preferred.
A Margarita should almost always have some measure of agave syrup, even if it also includes Cointreau, in order to give it extra body and sweetness.
A Margarita should always include salt, but inside the cocktail, rather than on the rim. If you must have a salt rim — and it’s your cocktail, so make it how you want! — I suggest a salt half-rim.
The Margarita as Sour
We’ll start with a Tommy’s, since in many ways it’s the most elemental of the bunch. Every good Margarita is in some sense an answer to the question: What is a Margarita? And the Tommy’s Margarita responds: It’s a tequila sour — specifically a tequila-lime sour sweetened with agave syrup.
I have adjusted the proportions somewhat from the original, primarily by reducing the amount of lime juice to a half an ounce, down from a full ounce. This is a matter of personal taste, but I find this change makes for a better balanced drink, and one that better shows off the tequila. If you still find this too sweet or too rich, increase the amount of lime.
Tommy’s Margarita
4 drops saline solution* (or pinch salt)
½ ounce agave syrup
½ ounce fresh lime juice
2 ounces 100 percent agave blanco tequila (Espolon)
INSTRUCTIONS
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker.
Add ice, then shake for 10-12 seconds until the outside of the shaker is frosty cold.
Strain into a rocks glass over ice.
Garnish with a wedge of lime.
The Basic Classic
If someone asks me for a Margarita, this is usually what I’ll make them. It’s a fairly basic structure, with the lime juice balanced by the Cointreau and a small hit of agave syrup. It’s incredibly satisfying: The biggest problem might be that it’s too easy to drink.
Margarita
5 drops saline solution* (or pinch salt)
¼ ounce agave syrup
¾ ounce Cointreau
¾ ounce fresh lime juice
2 ounces 100 percent agave blanco tequila (Espolon)
INSTRUCTIONS
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker.
Add ice, then shake for 10-12 seconds until the outside of the shaker is frosty cold.
Strain into a rocks glass over ice.
Garnish with a wedge of lime.
A Fancy Mezcal Margarita, Served Up
Historically, the Margarita is a tequila-based cocktail. But over the last two decades, bartenders have increasingly reached for its smokier, earthier cousin, mezcal, to make their margaritas.
It’s not hard to understand why: Mezcal, like tequila, is an agave-derived spirit from Mexico, and while the two spirits are far from interchangeable and are made from different processes, many tequila-based drinks work quite well with mezcal. Mezcal has also seen a huge surge in popularity over the last two decades. It was once understood mostly as a trashy, lesser form of tequila for spring break partiers — the weird stuff with the worm in it!
I won’t attempt a full course in mezcal today, but I’ll just say: Good mezcal doesn’t have a worm in it. And any contemporary guide to the Margarita that doesn’t include a mezcal version would obviously be missing something.
My favorite version (and the one pictured at the top) comes is based on a spec from the great New York City cocktail bar Employees Only. Like the Sidecar, it’s served up, in a small coupe, with no ice. With a larger portion of agave syrup, it splits the difference between the classic and the Tommy’s.
It’s smoky-sweet and more intense than a classic Margarita, yet it is still quite drinkable. When I’ve thrown cocktail parties with this on the menu, it is often the most popular drink.
Mezcal Margarita
5 drops saline solution* (or pinch salt)
½ ounce agave syrup
½ ounce Cointreau
1 ounce fresh lime juice
2 ounces mezcal (Del Maguey Vida)
INSTRUCTIONS
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker.
Add ice, then shake for 10-12 seconds until the outside of the shaker is frosty cold.
Strain into coupe or cocktail glass.
Garnish with a lime wedge.
*Saline Solution: Combine 1 tbsp salt and 4 tbsps water in a small saucepan. Heat on medium while stirring. Do not let boil. Stir until completely integrated — no salt sludge should remain at the bottom of the pan. Store in a small dropper bottle. Should keep for at least six months.
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Thoughts of using Grand Marnier as the orange liqueur?
I prefer Herradura or Fortaleza but agree that blanco is the only way to go. Espolon just doesn't do it for me. I do not use salt but will give it a try.